User blog:SgtNG/Interviewing Ian Underwood For his Bio
How did you meet Elphie? Years and years ago I was talking to a student I knew, and he told me he was in a high-school traineeship program where they made video games. Intrigued, I called up Elphie (the CEO of the traineeship program's company) and asked him if they were hiring. I came in the next day for an interview and he hired me to teach the students about making games. At the time we went by a different name and the company was pretty much focused on the traineeship program, but in that interview we talked a lot about how we wanted to grow the company into a fully fledged game developing company someday. -- What is your role at lightmare? My role at Lightmare is the Lead Designer, I'm the central point for the design of the game and pretty much everything that goes into the game passes through me at some point. I'm also a coder on the game, and have done a lot of the client's programming. I designed the core gameplay of Infinity Wars, and the majority of the original card sets. - Original being Core and Rise? Yes, and about half of infestation. -- How did the Idea for Infinity Wars come to be? Elphie and I were at a conference in Melbourne, showing people a demo for a game we had been working on (It was a great conference too, I got to meet Tim Schafer!). In our game there was a little mechanic where you got given a hand of traps, presented to you as cards. One of the guys we were showing the demo to mentioned offhand that he would love a full-blown digital TCG, and that got us thinking. At the time, there was really no major digital TCG's on the market (other major games like Hearthstone that are out now hadn't been announced to the public yet). Elphie and I have always been big TCG fans, and I'd been reading articles on designing TCGs ever since mtg.com began, and then applying those lessons to more traditional games. It seemed like the perfect match for us. -- The Card Tygris is based off of you? Yeah, haha. Tygris is based off of me. Elphie really wanted a card based off me, and wanted the card to reflect what I do, so I made a card that makes other cards! I really would like to make that card less confusing though. -- What Kind of Hobbies do you have outside of work? Mostly playing games! I play all sorts of video games, and before Infinity Wars was truly playable, I played a lot of TCGs like Magic. My life is pretty one-dimensional: I make games and play games. -- Have you done any other professional work? In the game industry, I've only made other games for Lightmare Studios. We've made a few other games before Infinity Wars, but Infinity Wars is really where we found our stride and started making a game we were really proud of. -- How did you get into making games? As a kid, I was always interested in making games. When I was nine, my family moved to a remote village in Indonesia for a few years, and we were all bored as hell all the time. My Dad got me a program called Klik and Play, an early Game Maker sort of program, and I started making games. It was pretty much all I did all the time once I got that, haha. It became one of the primary ways that our small community of kids would be able to get any sort of new entertainment. Once I started down that path, I realized it was the only career for me. -- What was the first faction that came into being? At the beginning we kinda had three factions that all sprang up simultaneously. We knew we wanted a magical faction, a technological faction, and a nature faction. These became Verore, Genesis and Warpath, respectively. The very first card that was ever designed was Aleta (which is appropriate), back when I was setting out the initial design and brainstorming ideas for cards that would exist in this world of infinite universes that came from a single source. I suppose the first card that was actually programmed was One of Many, because that card didn't need much work! -- Do you have any advice for aspiring game designers? Don't wait until you get a formal education to start making games, there's plenty out there to learn right now! Too often I'd see people in university that were in a course to make games, yet had never made a game in their life! I also think it's important as a designer to gain an understanding about all the aspects that go into making a game, game designer is a leadership position in many ways, and it's important that you're able to communicate effectively with your team, and know what you're asking of them. Lastly, I highly recommend against getting a degree in game design. I know there's a lot of these schools out there now that offer courses in game design, I advise anybody that's looking to get their foot in the door of the industry steer clear of them. It's not that these courses are bad, but companies are rarely going to be looking to hire somebody with a game design degree, companies want people with hard skills, like programming or art. I personally majored in programming, and I would recommend it: it's a very important skill to have when making games. You need the ability to create your vision and not always have it go through somebody else. Game design courses will often give you that all-round education I think is so important, but at the end of the day I doubt you'll get a job. -- Do you have any post- secondary experience? Yep. I went to Qantm College and got a degree in Interactive Entertainment, majoring in programming. -- What inspired your design choices for Infinity Wars? A lot of my guidance for design in Infinity Wars came from Mark Rosewater's archives of Making Magic (Mark Rosewater is the head designer of Magic: the Gathering). Those archives are an absolute gold mine, even for game designers that aren't making TCGs specifically. Other than that, a lot of the design choices for the game came from a pretty specific goal: to make a traditional TCG, with all the complexity and depth we love in TCGs, smoothly and intuitively in a digital medium . -- What is your favorite card? Either overall or from each set? My favorite card is a kinda obtuse one: Ferocity. I like the card because I think it's a victory in so many design aspects. On the surface, it does what Flame Dawn want to do: it allows your characters to have Charge, essentially. However, hidden away in the card are so many other ways to use the card that players discover over time: you can use it to temporarily remove a blocker when you need to get through, you can use it when you don't have initiative and expect some sort of board wipe and still get an attack in. The best card designs are those that have a clear, obvious purpose, but also have those elements of depth to them, without being immediately obvious and making the card confusing. My favorite card to actually play with, and one I didn't design, is Verore Magic Siphoner. I love setting up those big turns where you clear everything away and hit them for a ton of damage. It lends itself to a really interesting deck, with a high skill cap of balancing offense and defense, I think. -- What is your favorite faction? Verore is my favorite faction, I think. I've always been a control player. Unfortunately, they're also my least favorite faction to design for, it's difficult to make good Verore cards. You can't just keep giving them more and more removal, and their identity outside of removal is very lacking. It's something we've talked about a lot here, and tried a lot of different ways to get them to have an identity outside of removal. Unfortunately, some of those forays lead to some cards that, when in the context of Verore, ended up being too powerful and had to be nerfed. -- Do you play infinity wars recreationally? I play recreationally on and off, like I do with other games, usually depending on if my friends are playing at the time too. At Lightmare everybody plays for at least half an hour each day, so I get a lot of playing there too. There was a time when I could claim to be good at Infinity Wars, but now the players have far outpaced me, and do plays that blow my mind. These days I play on smurfs so that nobody knows who I am, I don't like having blue text giving away who I am, I want to play and talk to players like one of them, and get the real story about how the game is. -- What does your workstation look like? My desk is pretty bare, I don't like having stuff on it. There's a little Starcraft marine figure on one side, and a jumper I wear if I get cold (the guys like cranking the air conditioning up way too high). There's normally also a lot of water bottles standing beside the marine, I like to drink water whenever I think. For some reason the cleaners seem to have thrown them away though... -- What inspired simultaneous choices? The first thing we talked about when we decided to make a digital TCG was how we could take advantage of the digital platform. A lot of things came out of that talk, such as animated cards. I really wanted the counterplay that games like Magic have, but didn't want the awkwardness of passing priority and having to confirm every action your opponent does, so that started the thinking. At the same time, I was thinking about how in a lot of Magic-inspired TCGs, there's quite a few of them where as the attacker, you choose where all your attacks go (whereas in Magic you choose your blocks). I think it's a bad design choice to not let a player choose their blockers though, one of things I enjoyed so much in Magic is that even though it's not your turn, you are still making a lot of choices, and still feel like you're in the game and impacting it, and not just idly sitting back and watching your opponent do everything. Basically, it comes down to a fairly simple ideal: the player should be actively playing the game as much as possible. In traditional turn system, the player is only playing the game half the time. That's when I realized that we could have the players plan out their turns at the same time, and keep the player active much more. That was the catalyst for simultaneous turns. Once we explored the idea further, and came up with the different zones, it opened up all this gameplay about bluffing and prediction. I remember when I was programming Death Ray, and I realized I had to let the player target a character in the Support Zone, because they move it out that turn. I blew my own mind. -- Lastly, anything else you'd like to add for the community to know about you? I'm sure it's obvious by now I hold Magic in very high esteem, and play it a lot. I also play League of Legends and World of Warcraft a lot. I also get really excited when I see fan sites of Infinity Wars, I think it's amazing and makes me really happy. So keep doing it, guys! Category:Blog posts